It used to be that packet ships would carry the post across the ocean, always running the risk that they might founder and take messages — and lives — with them. Now we only have to worry about routers and servers, and rarely if ever are living beings harmed should one of these electronic packet pushers go down. But they do go down. And now, as then, it’s not always easy to figure out whether the break in communication is systemic or more personal.

Recently, for example, Netflix encountered serious problems with streaming that lasted, on and off, for a . . . [more]

The Ontario Court of Appeal just uploaded a speech by Chief Justice Winkler on labour arbitration and conflict resolution, although it was initially presented at Queen’s University on November 30, 2010.

We’ve all heard about Web 3.0, the semantic web which will be machine-readable, meaning that the substance of our communications will be the ground of action for programs.

Well here’s a shocker for those of us who have not connected the dots. You will read the web, and your browser will also read the web, but in addition websites, browsers, and other software will read you. What they learn in the process will affect the sorts of content that is made available to you.

We already see this in rudimentary forms when Amazon make suggestions to you, or when a . . . [more]

This case fits very nicely into our discussion about the need to avoid ambiguity in statements about law. It also shows how often ambiguity in the language actually used is too often associated with the writer(s)’ apparent confusion relating to the meaning of the concepts discussed.

Maybe the Court meant to make some of the assertions that the text of the reasons literally makes. And maybe they “misspoke” themselves.

We here in Canada hark with yearning for the likes of Pandora or Spotify. (I exaggerate slightly.) And we likely will for a while, because the Canadian arms of the big music copyright owners can’t seem to strike a deal with the internet. Which, some might think, only leads to circumnavigation.

One such music-purveying “wide sailor” has made available a bunch of Illustrated Mixtapes that you might enjoy. Gigawatt, a designer, has created sets of mixtape albumns designed to offer you listening pleasure throughout the various stages of your day. Thus, each of the five (soon to be six) . . . [more]

Here’s a story pointing out that the phone ‘hacking’ that has caused so many headlines (and resignations) lately in the United Kingdom was possible because of a simple default setting on mobile phones sold in the UK, that no one took the trouble to fix and that no regulator was prepared to take responsibility for. It’s a fascinating sad story:

As I understand the story, all phones provided by particular providers had the same default password for checking messages, so that if you called somebody and they didn’t answer, you could use the standard password to access their messages . . . [more]

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles that contributors at Slaw are reading and that you might find interesting. These tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

With the Canadian Law Blogs List now surpassing 300 entries (100 in the past year), along with the continued growth of law firms and lawyers using Twitter, Canadian legal web-commentary is definitely on the rise. One segment that’s lacked exposure, however, is the number of in-house perspectives from north of the border.

Happily, that change has started, with the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association (a Stem client) providing a foot in the Twittersphere door. Launched earlier this month to coincide with a website redesign, @CCCA_News will provide a mix of:

In his recent column on Slaw entitled Funding the LIIs, Sean Hocking wrote of the challenges faced by BAILII, the successes of AustLII and, to the extent information was available, the various funding models pursued by other legal information institutes. In referencing CanLII, he noted:

They don’t tell us much just that “CanLII is funded by the members of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, in other words, the law societies of Canada’s provinces and territories and the Chambre des notaires du Québec.”